Kellis,
I am so sorry you had to go through that torment. My middle school classmates ruthlessly bullied me because they thought I was gay, and my father shouted at me once for wanting to hold his hand for the same reason. I got very close to running away from home because it got so bad. Your experience isn’t an outlier in my hometown, I’m sorry to say. We have a homeless shelter for youth here called Urban Peak, and most of its residents were kicked out of their parents’ house for being LGBT.
For the most part, though, everyone including me thought I was straight and cisgender. I tried for the longest time to be a man, and when I couldn’t find it in me, I just decided for the next decade I could find myself after I had checked off all of my academic goals.
It didn’t work. I felt like a shell of a person that could only feel negative emotions. I bullied others who weren’t as ambitious as me, because I thought that was the only purpose of living. I saw friends as resources for academic help, not as human beings, because I didn’t even know what it felt like. Even my one intimate relationship, I saw my partner for what she could achieve, not who she was.
I am not proud of who I was. I was a miserable, empty, pushy shell. Dressing in women’s clothes is the first time, apart from being with my grandmother, that I have not felt this way.
I don’t dare come out to everyone- yet. How did you get through the time before you came out? How did you avoid going back in the closet to yourself?
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